


Time That Is Given Us

by lemurious



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Mortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:02:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28826385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemurious/pseuds/lemurious
Summary: Finrod is worried that the end of his time with Bëor is coming too soon, and Bëor reassures him with words that will echo through ages to come.
Relationships: Bëor the Old/Finrod Felagund | Findaráto
Comments: 29
Kudos: 18
Collections: 2021 My Slashy Valentine





	Time That Is Given Us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notparticularly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notparticularly/gifts).



> Dear Recipient, I hope you enjoy the fic! Happy Valentine's day!

It did not befit a King of the Noldor to spend the evening pacing around the room, biting his carefully polished fingernails and jumping at every sound that even vaguely resembled hoofbeats, but Finrod had long given up the pretense at royal aloofness. _Exactly thirty years ago_ , he thought. 

Though he could not stand the courtly rituals since Valinor and was glad to see them wiped out by the crossing of the Grinding Ice, when their only focus was on surviving until the next meal, then the next exhausted, half-shivering slumber, over and over until time could once again be counted in days. Sometimes he still woke up with a start and had to convince himself that the darkness outside, so different from the glittering walls of the cities built by his family either here or in Valinor, contained only their town, so newly built that it still smelled of freshly cut wood. _Their_ town, the town the Men had constructed under the watchful guidance of Bëor their chieftain, and Finrod himself, to whom nobody could quite assign a title or a role.

Finrod’s mouth twisted in a wry smile as he remembered that first morning when the Men awoke to the sound of his golden harp. How the Elven minstrels had warped the event to fit their own idea of the Secondborn, frozen in terror, stricken dumb by the superiority of the Elven music! In reality the Men awoke as soon as he sat down, and surrounded him before the end of the first note, weapons drawn. Finrod began to fear for his own life, until their young, broad-shouldered leader ordered everyone to stand down and sat next to Finrod, determined to achieve some sort of communication, through signs if necessary, or, as Finrod began to play, by starting an amused, teasing sort of song, in an unknown language, but entirely in tune with the harp.

Thirty years into what he had once called a brief foray into the East to get rid of the nightmares still haunting him from the Ice. That was the official version he gave to his cousins, politely avoiding the topic of their endless campaigns into the North, which despite boasting about the piles of their dead enemies left on the field could not make a dent in the iron walls of the empire. Finrod was tired of squabbling between the princes, who only seemed to agree about one thing: that regardless of how threadbare might be their cloaks or how rickety their dwellings, their very _Elvishness_ should be sufficient to rule, according to their most frequently used epithets, those half-wild Secondborn and grubby, gold-obsessed Dwarves. After one interminable candlelit feast for a minor victory, Finrod simply decided that he could not stay anymore, packed his few possessions with particular care for the harp, and rode as far Eastwards as the road could take him.

Thirty years and counting, Finrod thought again, and then hoped with increasing desperation that there would still be more years to count, _together_. Because after a few songs, and sharing the breakfast, and the sounds of Quenya and the language of Men repeated with utmost earnestness, he somehow never continued on his journey, nor truly separated from his eager translator.

When Bëor was gone on his many hunting trips and meetings with the neighboring townships, Finrod remained as his second in command, acutely aware that their whole life only counted as a brief respite in the eyes of his kin, and the war, vast and ancient and ruthlessly patient, awaited him just outside the walls of their town. He would have to rejoin it some day, and Finrod was afraid to think beyond that, for he, like his sister, occasionally had glimpses of foresight, but unlike her, had done everything he could to avoid them.

But now Bëor was _late_ , almost a full day late in returning from the hunt, and Finrod was fighting the creeping terror that this day would mark the time when their lives would inevitably transmute into a legend.

At last he heard the riders approaching and rushed out into the yard to greet them, searching for the familiar figure on the horse, who was now dismounting with visible difficulty.

“Are you hurt?” he blurted out in lieu of a greeting.

“Took a tumble or two, but got us a couple of sizeable boars – they will last a while,” Bëor responded dismissively, wrapping his arm around Finrod’s shoulders as he walked in through the door, leaving his horse outside for the attendants.

Once the door latch clicked shut, Finrod could not for the life of him explain why his legs suddenly gave way and he sat down in a near collapse, straight onto the bearskin rug, and burst into sobs. He had not cried in years. In _decades._ Perhaps, not even since the Grinding Ice took his cousin’s wife and they all had wailed and sobbed in release of grief that was only tangentially associated with any single death.

His rush of tears stopped as abruptly as it had started, while Bëor was calmly bustling about, taking off his overcoat and boots, putting a kettle on, with the certainty that had come from their three decades together that Finrod would find more comfort in his familiar movements than in any words of love.

Considering that they had spent their lives talking to each other and everyone else in the town – leading, negotiating, training, teaching, exchanging histories and stories and jokes – their relationship had never needed words. It simply burst into existence, solid and irrevocable, from their first shared song, and the rest of their lives had to move to make space for it. They had learned to comfort each other without speech, through Finrod’s nightmares of the blood on ice, and on the sand of pearls before it, through Bëor’s grief at his daughter’s death in childhood, at his former wife’s illness that had wasted her from the inside only a year before their fateful encounter, but now, Bëor thought, the time might have arrived when they would have to start talking.

“What happened?” he asked, gruffly and tentatively, pulling Finrod into a hug.

Finrod’s answering smile was entirely too bright. “Nothing. Just a sudden emotion. I am happy you are here.”

“Now tell me the truth.”

“I was afraid you may never return,” Finrod began, stumbling over his words.

They had never talked about Bëor’s mortality, despite it having recently become a joint shadow that was steadily creeping behind them, darkening each time Bëor complained about the pain in his back, or refused to spur his horse into a gallop for sheer pleasure, or allowed his son to take over the meeting of the town council, while Finrod remained at his side with his golden hair and skin without a blemish, unchanging since the night they had met.

“I can hardly bear seeing you hurt, but I know how much hunting means to you, and would not forbid you from doing what brings you happiness – but still…

“I wish we had – had more time,” he finished in a small broken voice.

“I wish I could take you with me, could take us _back_ , to where I was born, and maybe then and there we would. But that is not possible, may _never_ be possible even for me alone, even for my descendants…”

Bëor knew that Finrod was centuries older than him, but sometimes he looked so desperately _young_ when faced with the unfairness of the world. Well, Bëor supposed, the Elves would consider him hopelessly naïve as well – experience and age do not always follow the same rhythms.

He had been thinking of it too, realizing that as strong and healthy as he looked, he already began to feel bruised and brittle, and there was no bargaining with time. Not for him, anyway. He mostly considered his life a job well done, and something to be proud of, in spite of worrying what would happen to Finrod once he was gone. Somehow the idea of Finrod returning to his own kin did not seem as pleasant as Bëor had imagined before the tales of their deeds had reached his ears.

“There’s no use to dwell on what would happen if we had more time. We don’t. All we can decide now is what to do with the time that is given us.” Bëor concluded, hoping that them finally _talking_ would help Finrod face his grief slowly, through another decade or so, and accept it to some degree before he was gone and their love passed into a story. He could not care less about the stories that his life would turn into, but he knew that Finrod might find comfort in being able to preserve their memories long after having to leave this township of Men and the illusion of a quiet life at the edge of battle.

\----

Finrod had kept Bëor’s words hidden, even from himself, rationing them as a precious, life-sustaining cordial, remembering them and the voice full of care and concern only when grief would hit him so hard that he could hardly breathe.

The only time he spoke them aloud was when he saw his young companion succumb to despair in the dungeons of Taul-in-Gaurhoth, yelling in hopeless rage at the guards who had come to take Finrod away to what he suspected would be a battle of wills the likes of which he had never experienced, and secretly even looked forward to it, a little, as a change in the interminable sequence of the Noldorin war games. His words were enough to encourage Beren to take a deep breath and square his shoulders as far as the manacles allowed. It was not time yet to give in.

In the next few minutes, while being walked to the throne room by the Orcish guards, Finrod’s foresight hit him so unexpectedly that he stumbled and nearly fell, losing his footing. He heard his words retold across generations, from Beren to his grand-daughter, who then whispered them to her own sons, a pair of tiny Elflings lost in the forest, eyes full of desperation locked onto a jewel at her chest; then one of the same Elflings grown up, a lord of a home for the broken and the lost, trying to reassure a careworn Maia of his choices to protect a land in the North that Finrod had never heard about; finally, the Maia saying it himself to give courage to a small cloaked figure going on a quest that was doomed to fail.

 _But what quest isn’t_ , thought Finrod, listening to Bëor’s words echo through the ages, as a memorial more eternal than any stone could be, watching his guards open the last door to the throne room of his Enemy’s chief Lieutenant, _and now I can finally say my farewells._


End file.
